Activision senior producer Yale Miller has clarified as to why Call of Duty: Ghosts suddenly features female Ghost soldiers now. Speaking to VG247, he stated that, “Well I think it all started with the character customization stuff and it made sense, right?”
“There are female soldiers in combat. Why shouldn’t there be? It’s one of those – and I know it’s a story beat for this, but it’s like, it just makes sense. That’s the way it is. There are women in combat, so it’s kind of a no-brainer. Why shouldn’t they be? We get asked that question by girl gamers all the time, like, ‘When are you going to put a female character in?’ There should be.”
Now, here’s the funny thing: Activision has said for a long time that they can’t bring female characters to Call of Duty due to technical limitations. On pressed as to why it took so long, Miller answered, “I think the character customization added that. There’s so much work. Character customization is not as easy as, ‘Oh, we just did character customization.’
“There’s a ton of engine and backend work to be done. If you think about it, you have the same texture in the game over and over again, if you had that and the game was all these walls made of the same texture. You only need that texture once, right? But when you’ve got all these different textures, all these different models, it’s a whole lot of back end work that’s needed to be done.”
Long story short, there wasn’t any motivation to put in female soldiers until fans, especially girl gamers, began demanding it. Who wants to bet that Activision took one look at female soldiers in Battlefield 4 and mandated the inclusion of the same in Call of Duty: Ghosts?
